Catalogs provide metadata, such as databases, tables, partitions, views, and functions and information needed to access data stored in a database or other external systems.
One of the most crucial aspects of data processing is managing metadata.
It may be transient metadata like temporary tables, or UDFs registered against the table environment.
Or permanent metadata, like that in a Hive Metastore. Catalogs provide a unified API for managing metadata and making it accessible from the Table API and SQL Queries.
The GenericInMemoryCatalog is an in-memory implementation of a catalog. All objects will be available only for the lifetime of the session.
HiveCatalog
The HiveCatalog serves two purposes; as persistent storage for pure Flink metadata, and as an interface for reading and writing existing Hive metadata.
Flink’s Hive documentation provides full details on setting up the catalog and interfacing with an existing Hive installation.
Warning The Hive Metastore stores all meta-object names in lower case. This is unlike GenericInMemoryCatalog which is case-sensitive
User-Defined Catalog
Catalogs are pluggable and users can develop custom catalogs by implementing the Catalog interface.
To use custom catalogs in SQL CLI, users should develop both a catalog and its corresponding catalog factory by implementing the CatalogFactory interface.
The catalog factory defines a set of properties for configuring the catalog when the SQL CLI bootstraps.
The set of properties will be passed to a discovery service where the service tries to match the properties to a CatalogFactory and initiate a corresponding catalog instance.
How to Create and Register Flink Tables to Catalog
Using SQL DDL
Users can use SQL DDL to create tables in catalogs in both Table API and SQL.
Users can use Java, Scala, or Python API to create catalog tables programmatically.
Catalog API
Note: only catalog program APIs are listed here. Users can achieve many of the same funtionalities with SQL DDL.
For detailed DDL information, please refer to SQL CREATE DDL.
Database operations
Table operations
View operations
Partition operations
Function operations
Table API and SQL for Catalog
Registering a Catalog
Users have access to a default in-memory catalog named default_catalog, that is always created by default. This catalog by default has a single database called default_database.
Users can also register additional catalogs into an existing Flink session.
All catalogs defined using YAML must provide a type property that specifies the type of catalog.
The following types are supported out of the box.
Catalog
Type Value
GenericInMemory
generic_in_memory
Hive
hive
Changing the Current Catalog And Database
Flink will always search for tables, views, and UDF’s in the current catalog and database.
Metadata from catalogs that are not the current catalog are accessible by providing fully qualified names in the form catalog.database.object.